fifth avenue

1/2 Brandy (2 oz Camus VS Cognac)
1/4 Italian Vermouth (1 oz Cocchi Vermouth di Torino)
1 dash Maraschino (1/4 oz Luxardo)
1 dash Curaçao (1/4 oz Pierre Ferrand Dry)
1 dash Pineapple (1/2 oz)
(1 dash Angostura Bitters recommended, see notes)

The recipe provided no mixing instructions, so I shook with ice and strained into a cocktail coupe. Stirring would be appropriate too.

Two Wednesdays ago, I ventured into Pioneers of Mixing at Elite Bars: 1903-1933 and spotted the Fifth Avenue. Give the prestigious and historic roadway cutting through Manhattan, there are plenty of unrelated drinks under that name including one that I made in my pre-blog adventures. It may have been the overuse of the name or more likely the unbalanced appearance of the recipe that I caused me to pass it over multiple times. The Pioneers book does have several Manhattan-style (spirit + vermouth) with pineapple that have worked well like the Radio Call and the Martinique, so I set about to adapt the recipe. When I posted the drink on Instagram, a follower asked if a dash of pineapple was enough to be detected. My reply was, "If you truly did a dash, it would be useless. A lot of that book needs to be reinterpreted to be interesting and tasty. I view it as a drink skeleton to exercise your personal balance sensibilities. This is coming from making perhaps a hundred recipes from that book."
At first pass (before I added bitters), the Fifth Avenue shared a pineapple aroma accented with nutty cherry notes. Next, the pineapple continued on into the sip where it mingled with the vermouth's grape, and the swallow gave forth Cognac, nutty cherry, and slightly bitter orange flavors. However, the combination felt a bit disjointed, so I added in a dash of Angostura to the mix. Instantly, the bitters helped solved this problem by tying together the disparate flavors and allowing them to provide depth as the elements were glued together.